Le Corbusier and the Occult

Birksted performs an important service for the understanding of Le Corbusier. Using sources hitherto ignored, he demonstrates the depth of Le Corbusier's indebtedness to Freemasonry—its configurations, its associations, and its dream of redemption through the arrangement of things and people in space. At a time when modern artists were seeking orientation in Gurdjieff, Ouspensky, Blavatsky, Steiner as well as in myth, alchemy, psychology, technology, and atomic physics, Le Corbusier seems to have acknowledged in Freemasonry a comprehensive metaphor of architecture's role in the culture. Birksted's significant and original research confirms Roger Aujame's belief and helps to account for Kaufmann's intuition of a deep continuity between the architectural aspirations of the 18th and 20th centuries.

Peter Carl, Department of Architecture, University of Cambridge

Reading Le Corbusier and the Occult, I felt the voyeuristic interest and morbid fascination of a spectator during an exhumation. Birksted's disinterment of Le Corbusier revealed that, metaphorically speaking, the remains of one of modernism's greatest saints and heroes had not been incorruptible, and that the corpse of the man born as Charles-Édouard Jeanneret had been accompanied by strange offerings associated with secret societies and mystic traditions. Many of the questions raised by the disclosure of Corbusier's occult inspirations and para-Masonic dreams remain unanswered—but Birksted's brilliant and tenacious investigation into the complex and somewhat murky social foreground and spiritual background of Jeanneret's formative years in La Chaux-de-Fonds has forever changed the ways the Master of the Right Angle will be remembered. A tour de force!

Robert Jan van Pelt, University Professor, School of Architecture, University of Waterloo